There is a widespread need for universal identifiers—database “keys”—to facilitate the collection, merger and exchange of data across broad-based populations and time scales. Within the United States, the Social Security Number (SSN) has become the de facto standard identifier that is used to associate data with a selected individual. However, since the SSN is so readily tied to the individual, use of the SSN as a database key poses the risk of privacy abuses, including but not limited to identity theft. Since the use of a universal identifier (such as the SSN) is often outside the knowledge or control of the person to whom the identifier is assigned, the potential for continued and ongoing misuse is significant.
Because individual privacy and confidentiality rights cannot be safeguarded with current approaches, governmental efforts to assign unique universal personal identifiers have met with significant legal opposition in the United States. For example, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has proposed the introduction of “unit-level” data collection to allow for the aggregation of a variety of personally-identifiable data about students over the course of their education. Collection of comprehensive educational data is essential for informed decision and policy making, but attempts to implement mandatory national data collection via personally identifiable IDs have met with significant legal challenges, in additional to financial and logistical ones.
Many types of national, state and other initiatives have been under scrutiny and subject to cancellation because they are unable to collect and analyze the data needed to determine program efficacy and cost-effectiveness.
In general, universal identifiers and their use in the collection of personal and confidential data are currently prohibited or protected by a wide body of law, especially in legal, medical, educational and financial contexts. Many social, financial, medical and other types of applications share these types of difficulties and thereby lack the means for collecting data which is needed for rigorous evaluation and scientific investigation.
Thus, a need remains in the art for providing a universal process that may be used to confidentially collect and exchange data from a variety of sources for a variety of purposes.